PHILOSOPHER AND JOURNALIST
Rarely has a politician received a heavier blow than this which fell
upon Clemenceau in 1893. Ordinarily, a man of his intellectual eminence
and remarkable political faculties has no difficulty, if he loses one
seat in the National Assembly of any country, in speedily getting
another. Not so with Clemenceau. His very success as leader of the
advanced Left and the proof that, though always a comparatively poor
man, he had remained thoroughly honest amid all the intrigues and
financial scandals around him told against him. He interfered with
too many ambitions, was a stumbling-block in the way of too many high
policies, to be able to command his return for another constituency.
The same interests and jealousies which had combined against him at
Draguignan would have attacked him with redoubled fury elsewhere.
Persistent determination to carry really thorough democratic reforms in
every department, combined with very high ability, relentless disregard
of personal claims, complete indifference to mere party considerations
and perfect honesty are qualities so inconvenient to modern politicians
of every shade of opinion that the wonder is Clemenceau had held his
position so long as he did. To have destroyed no fewer than eighteen
more or less reactionary administrations, while always refusing to form
a Cabinet himself, was a title to the highest esteem from the mass of
his countrymen: it was a diabolical record from the point of view of
the Ministers whom he had displaced and the cliques by whom they had
been surrounded. Not a French statesman but felt that his reputation
and his hold upon office were more secure now that Clemenceau's
masterly combinations and dynamitical oratory were safely excluded
from the National Assembly. So Clemenceau, at this critical period
of his life and career, could rely upon no organised political force
strong enough to encounter and overcome the persistent hostility of his
enemies.
A weaker man would have felt this exclusion less and have been
discouraged more. After seventeen years of such valuable work as
Clemenceau had done, to be, to all appearance, boycotted from the
Assembly for an indefinite period was a strange experience. I wrote
him myself a letter of sympathy, and in his reply he expressed his
special bitterness at the attitude of the Socialists towards him. This
hostility might have been easily averted without any sacrifice of
principle on Clemenceau's part. But Clemenceau, defeated and driven out
of his rightful place in active French politics, did not hesitate for
a moment as to the course he would pursue. He had left the National
Assembly as the first Parliamentarian in France: he at once turned
round and at the age of fifty-two became her first journalist. Nothing
in his long life of stress and strain is more remarkable than the
success he then achieved and the vigour with which he devoted himself
to his new vocation.
It is no easy matter, especially in France, for a publicist and
journalist to discover a fresh method of bringing his opinions to
bear upon the public. Yet this is what Clemenceau did. He applied his
humanist-materialist philosophy to the everyday incidents of French
life. That philosophy is a strange compound of physical determinism
and the ethical revolt against universal cruelty involved in the
unregulated struggle for existence. The fight for life is inevitable.
So far, throughout historic times it has been a long campaign in
which the usurping minority have always won. Wholesale butchery and
cannibalism by conquering tribes have been transformed first into
slavery, then into serfdom, lastly into the wage-earning system of our
own time. In each and every case the many have been at the mercy of the
dominating few. There is little or no effective attempt made to remedy
the evils arising out of such a state of things. The struggle for
mere subsistence still goes on below, and those who revolt against it
or endeavour seriously to ameliorate it by strikes or combinations are
treated as misdemeanants or criminals. Mining capitalists, industrial
capitalists, railway capitalists, landowners large and small have the
law, the judges, the magistrates, the police and all the reactionary
forces on their side. Hence the grossest injustice and the most
abominable oppression of the poor.
Therefore the State ought to intervene, not in order to repress the
aspirations and punish the attempts of the wage-earning class to obtain
better conditions of life for themselves and their children, but to
protect this most important portion of the community in every possible
way: to secure for them shorter hours of labour, thorough education,
full opportunity for legitimate combination, boards of arbitration to
avert strikes, fair play at the hands of the courts and the police.
The State, in fact, is to act as a national conscience and perpetual
trustee for the poor. Note that the struggle for existence, the fight
for subsistence must go on--Clemenceau has never contemplated the
possibility of a human scheme of co-operation by which competition
would be wholly eliminated--but its harsher features ought to be
reduced. There is no complete overthrow of mutual destruction, and
no condition of universal fellowship is in view. Only the mind and
heart of the community must be changed; men must survey modern society
from the point of view of humane guidance and prepare the material
development and economic arrangements which shall by degrees render
individual injustice and cruelty as unheard-of as now is anthropophagy.
At the back of all this lies a picturesque pessimism and what nowadays
is frequently spoken of as a philosophy of despair. No sooner has this
planet, its solar system, its galaxy of suns and worlds reached its
full development than they all begin to traverse the downward path
which leads slowly and inevitably to decay and eventual destruction,
until the entire process unconsciously and inevitably begins over
again. Infinity oppresses us all: the cosmos with its interminable
repetitions eludes conception by the human intelligence. Yet we live
and strive and feel and hope and have our conceptions of justice and
sympathy and duty which come we know not whence and pass onwards we
know not whither. Man as a highly organised individual entity becomes
superior to the mere matter of which his mind is a function, because as
an individual he can rise up out of himself and criticise and reflect
upon that which, without any such power of conception, surrounds,
upholds and then immolates him. "The universe crushes me," wrote
Pascal, "yet I am superior to the universe, because I know that it is
crushing me and the universe knows nothing about it at all." Strange
to find Clemenceau quoting and agreeing with an intelligence so wholly
different from his own as Pascal's!
Then, fate, necessity, the Nemesis of Monism working on to its foreseen
but uncontrollable destiny, dominates the cosmos and through the cosmos
that infinitesimally small but sentient and critical microbe man, who
creates an individual ethic out of this determinist material evolution.
Francis Newman, the brother of the famous John Henry the Cardinal,
said that it is as impossible for man to comprehend matter developing
and reproducing itself from all time as it is for him to conceive of
an omnipotent deity superintending the matter he has created in its
evolution from all time. We are therefore driven back, whether we like
it or not, upon the ancient and never-ending discussion of free-will
and predestination in a non-theological form which leaves in the main
all the psychologic phenomena untouched, including Clemenceau's own
social morality that impels him to champion the cause of the oppressed.
Beyond the demand for justice in the abstract and freedom in the
abstract applied as a test to each special case as it arises, there
is no guiding theory in Clemenceau's philosophy. The recognition of
the struggle for existence among human beings, as among plants and
animals, does not imply any conscious co-ordination of effort, arising
out of the growth of society, in order to do away with the antagonism
engendered by life itself. So with all his humanism Clemenceau will
not accept the theories of scientific Socialism which could give an
unshakable foundation to his own views of life. That is the weakness
which runs through all his books and articles. His own individuality is
so powerful that he simply cannot grasp the possibility of anything but
individual effort, personal suasion and isolated measures of reform.
Nevertheless, we come upon a passage which, written obviously in
perfect good faith, would, within its limits, be accepted as a
fair statement of Socialism from an outsider: "Socialism is social
beneficence in action, it is the intervention of all on behalf of
the victim of the murderous vitality of the few. To contend, as the
economists do, that we ought to oppose social altruism in its efforts
is to misrepresent and seriously calumniate mankind. To complain that
collective action will degrade the individual by some limitation of
liberty is to argue in favour of the liberty of the stronger which
is called oppressive. Is it not, on the contrary, to strengthen the
individual by restraining and controlling every man who injures another
man as does the employer of to-day when left to the bare exigences
of competition? . . . . Follow the _laissez-faire_ policy for the
individual, says the anti-social economist, and speedily a whole
regiment of devotees will rush to the succour of the vanquished. We
always wait, but see nothing save the terrible condition of humanity
which ever remains. . . . . Against this anarchy it is man's glory to
revolt. He claims the right to soften, to control fatality if he cannot
escape from it. How?"
And then Clemenceau, whom in active life none would accuse of undue
sentiment, goes off into a series of moral reflections and the need
for perpetual moral preachments which really lead us nowhither;
though, some pages further on, he quotes Karl Marx, who speaks of
the unemployed as the inevitable "army of reserve" due not to human
immorality but to the necessary functioning of the unregulated
competitive capitalism of our period. Yet the great French Radical
shrinks from the organised social collective action and revolution
needed to lift us out of this anarchy of oppression. He turns to the
individual himself and his hard lot under the domination of fate. He
has a justifiable tilt at free-will and personal responsibility. Thus:--
"But what is absurd, contradictory, idiotic is the responsibility
of the creature before the creator. I say to God, 'If you are not
satisfied with me, you had only to make me otherwise,' and I defy him
to answer me." And then, quoting from "Lucian's Dialogues of the Dead,"
he cites Minos as discussing with a new-comer who is brought before him
for punishment:
"All that I did in life," says Sostrates, "was it done by me
voluntarily, or was not my destiny registered beforehand by Fate?"
"Evidently by Fate," answers Minos.
"Punish Fate, then," is the reply.
"Let him go free," says Minos to Mercury, "and see to it that he
teaches the other dead to question us in like manner."
"Substitute Fate for Jehovah or by the laws of the Universe, and tell
me," puts in Clemenceau, "when the pot owes his bill to the potter."
All this and the farewell benediction which the author vouchsafes to
the human plaything of all these pre-ordered decisions of society do
not get us much further, even though after so many mischances he may
live on only to appreciate more thoroughly "the sublime indifference of
things eternal." That is not very consolatory by way of a materialist
viaticum. But it is the best Clemenceau can give.
None the less it is easy to comprehend why this sort of philosophy,
illustrated and punctuated by the keenest criticism and sarcasm on
the wrongs and injustice of our existing society, produced a great
effect. The commonest incidents of everyday life were made the text
for vitriolic sermonising on the shortcomings of statesmen and judges,
priests and police, industrial capitalists and mine-owners. Here and
there, also, a description of working-class life is given, so accurate,
so vivid, so telling that administrators of the easiest conscience were
led to feel uncomfortable at the kind of social system with which they
had been hitherto satisfied. With no phase of French life is Clemenceau
better acquainted than with the habits and customs of the French
peasantry. Thus we have a description of the peasant tacked on to a
nice little story of a poor fellow who, strolling along the highway on
a hot day and feeling thirsty, plucks a few cherries from the branch
of a cherry-tree which overhangs the road. The small proprietor is
on the look-out for such petty depredations and at once kills the
atrocious malefactor who had thus plundered him. The cherry-eater "had
despoiled him of two-ha'porth of fruit!" It justified prompt execution
of the thief by the owner. That such small robbery did not at once
give the latter the power of life and death over the thief is a point
of view that the peasant can never take. Why? Because of the penal
servitude for life to which he is condemned by the very conditions of
his existence, and the greed for property driven into him from birth to
death. It is the outcome of private ownership: the result of the fatal
saying, "This is mine."
"The peasant is the man of one idea, of a sole and solitary love.
Bowed, he knows only the earth. His activity has but one end and
object: the soil. To acquire it, to own it, that is his life, harsh
and rapacious. He speaks of _my_ land, _my_ field, _my_ stones, _my_
thistles. To till, to manure, to sow the land, to mow, to uproot, to
prime, to cut what comes from the land, that is the eternal object of
his entire physical or intellectual effort. Amusement for him: not a
bit of it. He has no other resource than to console himself for the
disappointment of to-day with the hope of to-morrow. He is at war with
the seasons, the elements, the sun, rain, hail, wind, frost. He fights
against the neighbouring intruder, the invading cattle, the birds, the
caterpillars, the parasites, the thousand-and-one unknown phenomena
which, without any apparent reason, bring down upon him all sorts of
unlooked-for ills.
"Then has he risen at dawn for nothing, badly fed, badly clothed,
sweating in the sun, shivering in the wind and the rain, exhausting his
energies against things which resist his utmost efforts? Do sowing,
manuring, labour and the pouring out of life all, too, go for nothing,
without rest, without leisure, without any thought but this: I toiled
and suffered yesterday, I shall toil and suffer to-morrow? And all this
is balanced by no pleasures but drunkenness and lust. No theatres, no
books, no shows, no enjoyments of any kind. Hard to others, hard to
himself, everything is hard around him."
Such is the peasant of Western France. Though the peasant of the
South is of a livelier and happier disposition on the surface, both
are at bottom the same. And France is still in the main rural France
as Clemenceau himself impressed upon me many years ago. That is the
influence which holds in check the advanced proletariat of the towns
and mining districts. They can see nothing outside private property,
property, property: yet it is this very unregulated individual
ownership which forces them to fight out their existence against the
hardships of nature with inefficient tools, insufficient manure and no
adequate arrangements for marketing the produce they have for sale.
High prices and a few advantages gained have somewhat ameliorated the
lot of the peasant, but it is still a hard, depressing existence which
cannot be made really human and happy for the great majority under the
conditions of to-day. The only boon the peasant has is that he is not
under the direct sway of the capitalist exploiter. What that means in
the mines Clemenceau had an opportunity of seeing very close, as a
member of the Commission appointed to examine into the coal-mines of
Anzin in 1884. He tells of his experience ten years later in one of the
pits he descended. "Never go down a coal-mine," wrote Lord Chesterfield
to his son. "You can always say you have been below, and nobody can
contradict you." Clemenceau did not follow this cynical advice. He
went down, "and after having waded through water, bent double, for
hundreds upon hundreds of yards through dripping scales which hang
from the upper stratum, I crawled on hands and knees to a nice little
vein _twenty inches thick_. On this seam human beings were at work,
lying on their side, bringing down coal which fell on their faces and
replacing it continuously by timber in order not to be crushed by the
upper surface. You must not neglect this part of the work!" He was
not allowed to talk with the men themselves, and when they came to
interview him secretly they implored him not to let the manager or the
employers know, or they would be discharged at once! The old story of
miners in every country which even the strongest Trade Unions are as
yet scarcely able to cope with, though the tyranny in French mines has
been checked since the time Clemenceau wrote. These and similar cases
of oppression on the part of the capitalist class caused Clemenceau to
support Socialists more and more in their demands for limitation of
the then unrestricted powers of individual employers and "anonymous"
companies. So, too, individualist as he was, he wrote article after
article in defence of the right of the men to strike against grievous
oppression, holding that the combination of the workers was more than
sufficiently handicapped by the fact that they were bound to imperil
their own subsistence as well as the maintenance of their wives and
children by going on strike at all. This argument he applied to all
strikes in organised industries.
But Clemenceau naturally found himself drawn into bitter antagonism
to the doctrine of _laissez-faire_ and the law of supply and demand.
"You say all must bow down to them. I contend all must revolt against
them." "The individual struggle for existence is only a great
_laissez-faire_! Far from being liberty, it is the triumph of violence,
it is barbarism itself. The man who mastered the first slave founded
a new system . . . so completely that after some ages of this rule a
physiocrat overlooking it all would have sagely pronounced: Slavery is
the law of human societies. This with the same amount of truth as he
says to-day: The law of supply and demand is an immutable ordinance.
And, for all that, the supreme irony of fate has decreed that the
first slave-driver was at the same time the first sower of the seed of
liberty, of justice. For by enslaving men he created a social relation,
a relation different from that enjoined by the primitive form of the
struggle for existence: kill, eat, destroy. Henceforth man was bound to
man. The social body was formed." Man had to discover the law governing
the new relation, and he found it at last in the first flashes of
justice and liberty. "What, then, is this your _laissez-faire_, your
law of supply and demand, but the pure and simple expression of force?
Right overcomes force: that is the principle of civilisation. Your law
once formulated, let us set to work against barbarism!"
All that is telling criticism; though to-day it reads a bit antiquated
in view of the revolt everywhere against both these catch-phrases and
the anarchist chaos which they connote. But here again Clemenceau,
with all his acuteness and brilliancy, displays the need for a guiding
historic and economic theory--the sociologic theory which scientific
Socialism supplies. It was not justice or liberty which created
slavery, or destroyed slavery, but economic development and social
necessity. The cult of abstraction leads to social revolt but not to
material revolution.
Holding the opinions he did, it was inevitable that Clemenceau should
put the case of the Anarchists such as Vaillant, Henry, Ravachot.
They were the victims of a system. They could not rise as a portion
of a collective attack against the unjust class dominion and economic
servitude which crushed them and their fellows down into interminable
toil with no reward for their lifelong sufferings. So they made war
as individuals for anarchy. _Vive l'Anarchie!_ were the last words of
Henry. The man was a fanatic. "The crime seems to me odious. I make no
excuse for it," says Clemenceau, but he objects to the capital penalty.
"Henry's crime was that of a savage. The deed of society seems to
me a loathsome vengeance." Clemenceau compares, too, the anarchists
of dynamite to the would-be assassin Damien, so hideously tortured
before death. "My motive," said he, "was the misery which exists in
three-quarters of the kingdom. I acted alone, because I thought alone."
The anarchist, asked by his mother why he had, become an anarchist,
answered, "Because I saw the suffering of the great majority of human
beings." Vaillant, Henry, Caserio and their like are overmastered by
the same idea as Damien. They kill members of the king caste of our
society of to-day in order to scare the bourgeoisie into justice. There
is no arguing with honest fanatics of this type. Whether society is
justified in guillotining or hanging them is another matter. That their
method is futile, as all history shows, gives society the right if it
so chooses to regard it also as criminal.
The above is all argument and criticism put with almost savage vigour.
But Clemenceau used likewise the lighter touch of French irony. Thus
a wretched family of father, mother and six children, tramping along
the high road near Paris, found some coal which had dropped from a
wagon long since out of sight. They pick up these bits of chance fuel
as a godsend. They have gleaned after the reapers. Straightway, the
story of Boaz and Ruth occurs to Clemenceau, of Boaz and his descendant
of Nazareth, who is the God of Europe to-day. The Hebrew Boaz, the
landowner of old, gladly leaves the wheat-ears to be gleaned by Ruth
and marries her into the bargain. The Christian Boaz, the coal-owner of
our time, gets the males of the distressed family of coal-gleaners six
days' imprisonment. Such is progress through the centuries! The moral
of the whole story is brilliantly touched in.
So again in his comment on the catastrophe at the Charity Bazaar. It
was the rank and religiosity of the persons burnt alive which rendered
the tragedy so much more terrible than if the crowd thus incinerated
had only consisted of common people! It was the cream of French piety
that was there sacrificed. Quite an ecclesiastical and political
propaganda was developed from their ashes. The spirit of class made
these accidental victims of gross carelessness martyrs of Christian
heroism. Yet "if I go to dance at a charity ball, paying twenty francs
for my ticket, and expire on the spot, I am not on that account a
hero. . . . These gatherings are not exactly places of torture.
People laugh, flirt, and amuse themselves, it is an opportunity
to display fine dresses, and the charity sale has supplemented the
Opéra Comique for marriage-provoking interviews superintended by good
grandmothers. . . . Here is class distinction in action. Observe these
aristocratic young gentlemen beating with their canes and kicking their
frightened womenkind in their cowardly attempt to get out of danger.
Then see the servants rushing in to save them! Look also at the workmen
by chance on the spot risking their lives with true heroism, the
plumber Piquet, who saved twenty people and, though much burnt himself,
went back to his work-shop without a word." The contrast is striking.
It is not drawn by a Socialist.
Then the criticism on the German fête in commemoration of the victory
of Sedan. "William II is obliged to keep his people in training, to
militarise them unceasingly, body and soul. . . . In spite of the
handsome protests of most of the Socialist leaders, we may be sure that
it is in very truth the soul of Germany whose innermost exultation
is manifested in these numberless jubilations which have beflagged
every village in the Empire. . . . It is the curse of the triumphs of
brute force to leave room in the soul of the conqueror for nothing but
a blind faith in settlement by violence." Then follows a prophetic
summary of what must be the inevitable consequence of this consecration
of brutal dominion inspired by the hateful instincts of barbarism,
which together prepare to use in Central Europe the most efficient
means of murder at the disposal of scientific civilisation. The ethics
of the nation are being deliberately corrupted for the realisation of
the Imperial policy!
Thus Clemenceau, like others of us who knew the old Germany well, and
had watched its sad hypnotisation by the spirit of ruthless militarism,
foresaw what was coming more than twenty-five years ago. And thus
anticipating and reflecting, he chanced to see on one of the monuments
of Paris illumined by the sun, "The German Empire falls." It was dated
1805! "Short years pass. What remains of these follies? If law and
right outraged, reason flouted, wisdom contemned must blight our hopes,
as your warlike demonstrations too clearly prognosticate, then for you,
men of Germany, the inscription of the Carrousel is patient and bides
its time.
"And yet two great rival peoples worthy to understand one another could
nobly make ready a nobler destiny."
There you have the statesman and idealist as well as the clear-sighted
journalist. Clemenceau saw the storm-cloud ever menacing and ready
to break upon France. He warned his countrymen of their danger, bade
them prepare to meet it, but hoped continuously that his forecasts
might prove wholly erroneous. Jaurès unfortunately, with all his vast
ability, was too idealist and far too credulous. Hence his great
influence was thrown against the due preparation of his own country; he
did his utmost to support the anti-navy men even in Great Britain, and
only began to recognise how completely mistaken he had been just before
he was assassinated by the modern Ravaillac of religionist reaction. To
anticipate fraternity in a world of conflict is to help the aggressor
and to court disaster. This Clemenceau the Radical knew: to this the
French Socialists shut their minds.
It was natural that the Vendéen by birth, the Parisian by adoption,
should feel himself drawn rather to the ideals of the French capital,
which in matters of intelligence and art is also the capital of Europe,
rather than to the narrow spirit of the Breton countryside which he has
so vigorously sketched. In his writings as in his political activities
this preference, this admiration find forcible expression. From the
days of Julian the great Pagan Emperor down to the French Revolution
and thence onwards, Clemenceau briefly traces the development of the
City by the Seine, the French Renaissance and the University of Paris,
by the influence of the writings of Montaigne--"this city in right of
which I am a Frenchman"--and Rabelais: this meeting-place of Europe,
this Central Commune of the planet proposed by Clootz, the Prussian
idealist, becomes in the words of the same foreign enthusiast "a
magnificent Assembly of the peoples of the West." We may forgive the
French statesman his unbounded enthusiasm for the Paris where he has
spent the whole of his active life. "One phrase alone, 'The Rights of
Man,' has uplifted all heads. Lafayette brings back from America the
victory that France sent thither and straightway the great battle is
joined between Paris of the French Revolution and the coalition of
things of the past." "True, we have measured
_A la hauteur des bonds la profondeur des chutes_,
"but at least we have striven, and we abate not a jot of our generous
ambitions. Thus decrees the tradition of Paris . . . that Paris which now
as ever holds in her hands the key to supreme victory."